


Perchance to Dream

by Rucifer



Category: Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Genre: AU, Gen, Modern Fantasy, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-12
Updated: 2013-09-12
Packaged: 2017-12-26 09:13:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/964208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rucifer/pseuds/Rucifer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alice Liddell is a teen in the modern age, with a head full of opinions and not much by way of a brain-to-mouth filter.  When her mother ends up hospitalized, she happens upon a strange pendant that piques her interest.  Before she knows it, she ends up with a bunch of unwanted houseguests, all claiming her to be the only one who can get them back to their own world again.  The problem is, if she does manage to get them home to Wonderland, will she ever find her way back...?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which There Is A Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> Hey there, all! Just a couple of notes here~ 
> 
> This story is based very loosely upon the original books... and then tossed into a modern-ish setting. (At least for the beginning bits.) As a forewarning, there really are no clear relationship goals or pairings designed for this story. Not to say there won't be romantical intrigue at all (I imagine there will be quite a lot), but I've taken the perspective of "whatever happens, happens". I'm a character-driven storyteller and where the plot goes, is entirely up to the cracked-out head-children squealing around on these pages. So let's have fun with that!
> 
> Also, some of these chapters are going to be longer or shorter than others, but the overall work is probably going to end up close to novella-length. If you're not into a lengthy read, then this might not be the story for you. 
> 
> Please feel free to comment and whatnot. Okay bye!

Sunlight shone in through the narrow slits they deemed windows in this place. There were three of them in a row and if you stood back, just enough, you could almost make out the grounds outside of the hospital, providing you ignored the thick splash of walls in-between. Long, white hallways and antiseptic rooms greeted us for not the first time since the start of things. Day after day, I kept wondering if maybe this time things would be different - if when we walked in, she would somehow recognize us. My father had already given up on her. For that matter, I half wondered if maybe the doctors had, too. _Irritation factor over nine thousand!_ Call me stubborn, but if someone needed help, I had a hard time just walking away from them. That’s just me. Could be a fine and dandy approach to the world, if not for the fact that most people didn’t much appreciate what I had to say on matters a fair amount of the time. Some called me a troublemaker. I called me a realist. It’s okay, really. No one quite sees things exactly the way I do and that’s fine. Probably safer, all things considered.

  
“I’m afraid she’s unresponsive to therapy,” the doctor told us, his face contorted into a mask of carefully crafted neutrality. It was the kind of face someone used when they didn’t want to seem too hopeless, even if they personally have thrown in the towel, so they try for professionalism instead. Invariably, it made them come across as a dick, but hey. I’m probably biased. These guys have been annoying me from the very beginning of this whole shebang. Let’s just say I have my reasons. Oh, he was going for the pitying sad-boy routine now, shaking his head and looking down at his paperwork. For my part, I stayed by the windows that sparked vague internal association with prison bars, watching him carefully from the reflections in the glass. “It’s as if she’s trapped inside of her own world...”

  
“Is that a _technical_ term, doctor? Your final diagnosis?” Even to my own ears, the remark I tossed out into the open air sounded too cold, too sharp. If my words had been a bullet, he’d have bled. Fortunately for everyone concerned, I hadn’t quite mastered the art of telekinetic warfare. Uh, just joking there. Honest!

  
I watched him blinking, a phantom shape against the milling doll house perspective of the people below, before turning to face the room properly. My oldest sister was frowning at me. My youngest sister was sitting on the bed next to my mother, a magazine in hand, showing her the different pictures therein with softly spoken commentary on each one. My father sighed.

  
“Alice, not now.” Talk about a prompt reprimand. Not that I intended to pay much attention to it. Say what you wanted about me, but I wasn’t the sort to keep my mouth shut, when I’d decided something wasn’t right. _You’ve got to stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything._ I’d read that somewhere years ago and much to everyone else’s annoyance, the words had stuck with me. If I had to say what my own personal motto was, that would probably rank pretty high. Right up there next to: _Opinions are like assholes - everyone’s got ‘em and they all stink._ What? Tell me I’m wrong!

  
“Then when? After this guy has her committed for life? Locking her up and pretending there isn’t a problem doesn’t fix the problem. It just makes you feel better about giving up on someone.”

  
_“Alice!”_  
“What?”  
“If you can’t behave yourself–”

  
Since, you know. Speaking one’s mind, especially as a young adult, tended to mean you were ill-behaved or something. They called you a ‘bad kid’ or ‘ _that_ girl’, all because you had an opinion or perspective that no one wanted to hear.

  
To his credit, though, the doctor didn’t just write me off. How’s that for a pleasant surprise? Maybe I’d been too quick to judge him? Crap. “I have no intentions of having her committed in a long-term facility, at this stage of the game.”

  
Those pale green eyes seemed almost out of place in his otherwise dark complexion, but also softened his just this side of too-serious features. There was a peculiar rise and fall to his words, though I couldn’t place the accent. For all of my lofty goals of traveling the world one day, seeing what there was to see, finding every manner of adventure, I hadn’t even gotten out of state more than once and that was for a band trip. Six Flags was cool and stuff, but it sure wasn’t the kind of suspense I found myself craving.

This time, it was my father’s turn to be cynical. “Well, what else are you expecting to _do_ for her, if she’s unresponsive to the drugs?”

  
“Often times in cases of temporary memory loss like this, having the patient home, surrounded by people and things they should know, helps to trigger their memories.”

  
I held my breath, hardly able to believe that this was going the direction I thought it could be. But this was me and I definitely had to make sure, before I got my hopes up too far. “So... We can take her home?”

  
He nodded to me, his gaze flicking back to my father’s rigid stance for a moment. “There is no value to keeping her here. She’s not violent or self-destructive and in most cases where patients suffer from a mental break like this, the best possible treatment is to return to their home lives.”

  
Mary squealed out of nowhere, like she’d been listening the whole time and just now had gotten to the point where she understood the conversation. She squeezed Mom tightly and for her part, my blond haired, blue eyed mother just smiled calmly, soaking up the affection in a way I’d never quite seen her do in the past. Mom had been lots of things, but just plain _peaceful_ had never been one of them.

  
Not exactly thrilled with that, being the busy businessman that he was, my father took the doctor to the side, presumably to argue that he hadn’t the time to dedicate to taking care of a crazy lady. Mom and Dad had been talking about divorce, before all of this, so. Meh. That whole thing was complicated. Relationships, on a whole, tended to be. It was why I’d never put much thought into them myself, despite being a few months shy of eighteen. I’d been on a grand total of two dates and both times, I’d managed to mortally offend the guys who’d had the displeasure of my acquaintance. Hey, wasn’t _my_ fault. When it came to love, I believed very strongly in honesty between people. I felt everyone should know where they stood with one another; that is, not putting on fronts, or faking anything for the sake of anyone else. If someone liked you, then they’d accept everything about you - good, bad and ugly. Right? Damn right.

Charlotte rounded the bed, putting an arm around Mom’s shoulders. “You wanna get her clothes?”

  
I nodded and hopped to, pulling neatly piled stacks of clothing out of the tiny closet. Blouses, dresses. That had never much been my style. I was a jeans and t-shirt, big black boots and too much caffeine kind of girl, myself. In terms of looks, Char and I took after Mom with our pale blond hair and sky blue eyes, while Mary had Dad’s dark hair and eyes going on. We all looked like we needed some sun. Char took care of that at the tanning bed, while I personally did not want to be a leather purse by thirty, so uh, yeah.

My fingers lingered over the fine lace of the pretty clothing, glitter-blue painted nails tapping over the small round buttons for a moment, before I dragged her suitcase toward me and flipped it open. Somewhere in the piles of clothes I kept gathering up and setting inside the case, something heavy slipped out of the folds and clattered to the floor with a very metallic clunk. Yikes. What the hell was _that?_ Blinking, I looked down, only to find that the thing in question was something so totally outside my mother’s own personal style that it was honestly boggling my mind as to how it got in there to begin with.

  
A key. Elaborate in design and just this side of a movie prop. Silver in tone, with a red stone in the middle. The pieces surrounding the main focal point had a kind of red and black glaze to them, too. Small, glittering red stones decorated the main prongs of the thing. When I picked it up, there was some definite weight to the pendant, its small chain seeming far too delicate to ever have supported the thing. Where did it come from? No way this was Mom’s!

  
“You done or what?” My sister again.  
“Y-yeah...”

  
Quickly, I stuffed the thing into my pocket and zipped up the suitcase. Whatever the story with that thing was, it would have to wait. Well. At least until we got home, anyway.


	2. In Which There Is A Wedding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alice and her sister have a little bonding time. Woo??
> 
> In case anyone is wondering, I opted to go with middle names for both Lorina and Edith, since I felt their first names didn't entirely mesh with a modern setting.

So apparently, my father had no intentions of spending a whole lot of time at the house. Great. Fantastic. Alright, I shouldn’t have been so sarcastic about the whole thing, but it was hard to overlook the fact that he’d more or less just dropped us off and left for the office. From a logical and fair standpoint, I could look at things and say, _Okay, it’s hard for him to see someone he’d loved once and spent the past twenty years with, in this condition. I need to cut him some slack right now._ But from a purely practical perspective, I wanted to kick his damn head in for leaving us, right when we needed him to be the adult in this situation. As it was, the college freshman and the high school senior were the ones stuck trying to direct the nurses who were poking around the place, asking where they should put this or that, where we’d like her medications. We handled things perfectly fine. It just would’ve been nice if he’d stuck around, was all.

So typical. I wasn’t entirely sure why I was even surprised.

At least she was home now and not locked up in a too-small room with too-small windows, where people cried themselves to sleep at night. That was a plus. We had her set up in the guest room, where she’d had most of her things before. She’d been about to move out, back before this had hit. Truthfully, I was having a heck of a time looking at her and thinking that she was the same person these days. Once upon a time, she’d been a high-powered business attorney, handling some of the most sensitive cases the whole country over. The doctors seemed to think that the stress of her work, combined with the pending divorce situation had triggered the psychotic break she now suffered from, but...

Somehow, that just didn’t sound right to me. Maybe it’s because I’d always really looked up to my mother and I’m just viewing things from the perspective of admiration, but I couldn’t imagine _anything_ getting to her like this. The words ‘genetic predisposition’ kept getting thrown around, too. So, what? Did that mean she had been born to lose it someday or something? I didn’t buy that. Not for a second.

Mary was in with Mom, sitting on her bed and just chattering away. I watched them from the hallway for a moment, not sure how I felt about the warm smile my mother was giving my sister. Sometimes I could swear there were moments when she was really _home_ behind those eyes and other times... Other times, not as much. In any case, she hadn’t spoken a word, since everything had gone down. That alone worried me more than I cared to admit.

I meandered into the kitchen, flopping myself down onto one of the bar-style stools with a deep sigh. Finally, everyone was gone and it was just Char and I, hanging around the kitchen counter, the way we used to do in the morning before school. Much like then, she was making herself a couple of strawberry poptarts, the kind with icing and rainbow crumb sprinkles on top. Sensing my aura of _DO WANT THAT OMG GIVE_ , she hit the cancel button on the toaster and handed me one. We liked them a little warm, but not truly toasted. Weird, having someone else giving me food. I was so used to getting my own stuff that it made me smile instantly, maybe for the first time all day. Hell, all week.

“Thanks, CharChar.”

A soft chuckle was her initial reply, leaning against the counter in her designer top and skinny jeans, the multitude of accessories she wore clinking lightly with the motion. “How many times do I have to tell you not to call me that?”

“Always at least once more. It’s better than ‘Lotte, anyway.”  
“‘Lotte works better for college.”  
“Yeah, if you wanna be totally boring.”  
“What have I told you about that negative attitude of yours?”

Poptart dangling from my mouth, I fixed her with a very flat-eyed glare. I mumbled around the pastry, realized she hadn’t understood a word of it and rolled my eyes, swallowing a big, half-chewed bite. “I said, who the hell has a negative attitude?!”

She arched an eyebrow at me and smirked, just shaking her head like I’d proven her point exactly. “I’m just worried about you, Ali. You don’t have any decent friends in school, you don’t have a boyfriend, you don’t go anywhere to hang out with anyone... You’re always either here, or at the coffee shop and I swear you only go there, because you’ve got an undiagnosed caffeine addiction.”

“Do not,” I grumped peevishly, hunching over the counter, still nibbling at what little remained of the strawberry delight.

“And what about college? Have you thought about where you want to go yet? Have you even toured any campuses? This is your _senior year!_ You really have to put forth the effort to define your life goals and make some good memories, too.” Uhg. She was totally giving me the ‘big sister talk’, wasn’t she? But how could I even think of leaving for college at a time like this? There was a lot going on, with Mom and everything. Charlotte hopped up on the counter, sitting with her feet dangling over the edge, quiet for just a second, before she turned back to me and smiled. “You’ll regret it, if you don’t, you know. It’s a great big world out there. Grab yourself a piece of it.”

I shrugged and finished off my poptart. “I want to be like Indiana Jones, complete with the whip! You think there’s a college out there that can teach me to appropriate priceless, cursed statues and dodge angry natives?”

Charlotte about choked on her food, she laughed so hard, so suddenly. “Are you serious?!!”

“Totally! Just think of how cool I’d look in that hat, traveling the world, getting myself into and out of trouble. Or unleashing ancient mummies on the populace and having to put them down again. That’s totally what real archaeologists do, right?” Teasing only. I knew full well that the fantasy couldn’t be farther from reality, but it was still pretty fun to think about rediscovering things that no one has seen for thousands of years. It was just like stepping into a whole new world, you know? That kind of thing appealed to me.

In the giggle fits, I’d wandered off to the fridge, getting us a couple of sodas. I passed her one, then hopped up on the counter right next to her. “Ooowwww, it hurts,” she breathed, rubbing the cold can over her cheek. Smiling so much our faces hurt after - yeah, there hadn’t been much of this in my life, ever since she’d gone away for college. I missed it. I missed _her_. “Sometimes I forget what an ass you are. I let my guard down and you totally abuse it!”

“‘Course I do. Your fault for being too easy.”  
“Seriously, though. Please tell me you’re looking at colleges.”

Another mild shrug from me. “Looking, nothing. I got accepted to Cambridge. I just... Don’t know what to do about it, is all. If Mom stays like this–”

She elbowed me in the side, hard enough to drag out a loud _yipe_. “If Mom were with it right now, she’d totally kick your ass for even _considering_ sacrificing your education to hang out and play nursemaid to her.”

I rubbed my side gingerly, glaring over at her pointedly. “Yeah and if Mom were ‘with it’, she’d pitch fits, because I want to study Archaeology and not _Law_.”

“Like that would have stopped you.”

Minor eye roll from me. She had a point. “No, but she could have said she wouldn’t pay for it.”

“Dad would have. He doesn’t much care what we study, so long as we stay out of his way and don’t cause too much trouble.”

“Says the Fashion Major with a DUI under her belt.”

A small laugh from her. “I said too much, not none at all. Where’s the fun in that?”

“Jerk. I’m still mad at you for running off to college and leaving me behind. People suck and you suck marginally less than the rest of the populace.”

“Oh, gee, thanks. Don’t flatter me too much there. That kind of fluffing will go straight to my ego.” Wry smile over the rim of her soda can, sunset colors pouring in through the large, double glass doors off to the side of us. There was a ring I didn’t recognize on her left hand. Typically, she went for gold, but this one was small and silver, with a pretty pink pearl. Did she have a steady boyfriend these days? Honestly, I’d never thought to ask. With her, it tended to be someone new every week, but we’d barely gotten the chance to talk these past few months. It made me feel like a selfish ass, since I was dumping my crap on her and hadn’t even asked how she’d been.

“So, uh. I just realized I was being a jerk, just whining at you and hadn’t even asked how school and life and whatnot was going. Charchaaaarrrr how’s liiiiiiiiiiiiife?”

This time she gave me a little shove, drawing herself up like she had some great big secret that she wasn’t about to share. “Oh, well. Normal stuff, really. Just creating amazing designs, sewing outfits to perfection, getting chosen to work on a project with a famous model, getting _engaged_ to said famous model~”

My eyes couldn’t have gotten any bigger. “Wh- S- _seriously?!_ ”

Cue the schoolgirl giggling. Because for all the tough fronts she put on, my sister really was a softie at heart and she was... Wow. Just really, really happy. “Yep! His name is Antoine and he is beyond amazing. I mean, I can’t even tell you how just awesome and wonderful and kind and everything he is. It feels like we’re on the same page about everything.”

That sounded great and all, but... “I thought you said you wanted to design red carpet dresses and stuff like that. How did you get stuck making men’s clothes?”

Tanning or no, she got a shade or two paler, with that particular line of questioning. Had I hit a nerve? “A-ah... Well... The truth is...”

“Antoine’s a girl.” I finished her sentence, all serious-faced.  
She frowned at me. “No.”  
“Antoine has a kid sister he wants you to dress.”  
“No...”  
“You’re just doing this for a class project and later you’ll dress a famous actress.”  
“Well, that’s kind of a yes, but you’re getting way off base with this now.”

Alright. She had me stumped. My confusion showed and she got all sheepish on me. I was sort of getting the feeling that if I didn’t land on the right answer here, she wasn’t going to fess up. What could have her so–

“...Antoine likes to... wear women’s clothes?” Charlotte nodded, sliding me a careful glance from under the long, wavy curtain of blond hair she was trying to hide behind. “Oh. Is _that_ all?”

“You say it like you’re not even shocked!” She flailed around as she yelled at me and I couldn’t help but laugh at her all over again.

“I get it. Is this why you haven’t replied to my texts? You were nervous I’d think it was weird or something, so you did the hermit thing?” She nodded a bit and I stretched my arms out above my head. “Pssh. If he makes you happy, he could run around naked for all _I_ care.”

“He’s a make-up artist, too.”

“Oh well, _geez._ That’s pretty much a deal-breaker. Nope. Can’t ever like him now.”

Relief seemed to flood over her suddenly, one hand coming up to rest over her chest lightly. She sighed and it was a truly content sound. “I’m sorry. I was stupid. I should have just said something from the start, but I know how Mom or Dad would have reacted, so... It scared me, was all. No one at school even bats an eyelash, but when I come home, it always feels like I’m coming back to an angry mob and I lose my courage.”

“Yeah, those torches and pitchforks can be brutal. No worries, though. If anybody even looks at Antoine–”

“–Antoinette.”

“Er... Right. Well. If anyone causes trouble for him, I’ll kick their teeth into their spleens.” I threw her a wicked grin. Kickboxing, kids! It wasn’t just for show, you know. “Okay?”

Finally, I got a genuine grin out of her. “We’ll hold you to it. For the wedding, we’re already planning on designing our own dresses!”

I had to admit, I was so happy for her that I could have burst from the excitement of it all. Although, after three hours straight of listening to wedding plans, even I had to shelf my enthusiasm in favor of getting Mary and Mom to bed, not to mention myself. In the shower, all I could think of, was how amazing it was that she’d met someone she could really connect with in that way and how lucky she was to have the kind of support she did at school. She invited me to come meet ‘Nette (hence, her wanting to be called ‘Lotte), sometime after they finished their end project for the semester. I took her up on it, mostly because I wanted to meet anyone my sister might have been serious about.

Overprotective much? Maybe just a little.


	3. In Which There Is A Rescue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alice is a fussy sleeper and there are way more questions to be found for her in the wee hours of the morning, than answers...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember Kids: don't go wandering town alone at night. You might find boys in cages!! ....cometothinkofitthatcouldbeincentiveforsomepeople.....

Burning eyes glowered blearily at the digital clock display on my mp3 player. It was barely after one in the morning and I could not, for the life of me, convince my brain to shut off long enough to get some decent sleep. My fingers twitched, each in turn, as I counted off how many hours I’d gotten. The count stood at two and a half. Yep. That sounded about normal, for me. In all honesty, I was a catnap type of person, if left to my own devices and I preferred to do the bulk of my sleeping during daylight hours. For whatever reason, I felt like my brain worked better in the dark, or something. I kind of hoped my sleep figured itself out at some point, though. School got to be such a problem when my body did this sort of thing, since I’d always want to shamble off to bed, right about when I ought to have been waking up and getting ready. See the problem here? Me either.

Groaning, I rolled myself out of bed, done fighting consciousness for the time being. What I really wanted to do, was grab some books and brew some coffee, but the scent of it would wake everyone in the house (I’d made that mistake too often before). I pulled on a shirt and a pair of jeans, grabbing my messenger bag and boots on the way out of my bedroom. My eyes were only burning this bad, because I did the dumb and slept in my contacts again. Uhg. At least they hadn’t decided to relocate themselves in my eye socket this time. Always a plus. I set my bag down on the bathroom counter and my boots next to the cabinets, while I stared at the red creeping into the whites of my eyes in the massive mirror and set about fishing the lenses out of my eyeballs. This was why I kept my nails on the shorter side. I always felt like I was going to poke my damn eye out every time I did this crap.

Whine, whine, whine. Grouchy riser. Shut up.

Contacts out. Glasses on. They were dainty little things. Rectangular wireframes, but the kind that didn’t have a full frame, leaving the bottoms as just the lense. Also, they were metallic purple. Because I liked me some purple. And blue. And colors in general, really. Given that fact, you’d think I’d have a more colorful wardrobe, but meh. The amount of effort it required for me to pick out a coordinated outfit in the morning before class, when you took into consideration that I probably only got to bed an hour before having to wake up, was just too astronomically impossible to calculate. I wore whatever worked with blue jeans, generally. Fast. Easy. Very little focus necessary.

Bag and boots in hand, I yawned into my striped arm warmers, enjoying the feel of the knit against my skin. It was still pretty early for them, the weather too warm, but whatever. I liked sweater-y things. They made me think of the blankets I used to drag around with me everywhere as a kidlet. I dumped my bag on the kitchen table, dropped my boots on the floor and poked my head out into the attached garage. Nope. Dad wasn’t home. Probably wouldn’t be at all. Note my lack of shock.

The only real reason I cared at all, was because I wanted to go to the coffee shop (three cheers for establishments that never closed) and it was a pain sneaking out, when he was in the house. Like me, he was a light sleeper and definitely would have given me one of his ‘speeches’. Not that he was entirely wrong. It was a retarded time of morning to go wandering off in search of caffeine. Any number of bad things could have happened to a girl my age, just flouncing about town in the dark hours before dawn. This was also why I took kickboxing classes, had mace and if all else failed, I tended to carry no less than three encyclopedia-sized books with me at all times. Blunt force trauma - totally my friend. Stupid justification for being reckless, I guess, but whatever. It wasn’t like this was a horrible section of town or anything. I’d never had trouble in the past.

Boots on! Bag equipped! Go time!

Getting out of the house was easy enough. I kept looking over my shoulder, checking to see if lights flickered on anywhere, but they didn’t. In a weird way, that made my heart sink. I stuffed my hands into my pockets, lone footsteps echoing over the sidewalk. In one of them, my fingertips encountered the smooth slide of that key from earlier. Oh, yeah. I’d forgotten all about that thing, with as hectic as my night had been. Peering down, I half pulled it out of my pocket to look at it, when a loud sound from across the street nearly made me jump out of my skin.

I backed way up, pressing my back flush against the wall of a building, while my eyes searched the darkness for some explanation for all the fuss. “S-somebody! _Haaaalllppppp!!_ ” A male voice. Banging that sounded as if it were coming from something metal. Yelling that seemed somewhat muffled. Was someone in trouble? It frustrated me, that I couldn’t see where it was coming from. Cautiously, I crept across the street, not quite willing to let on that I was investigating just yet, in case it was a trap or something. Paranoia kept you alive, you know.

“P-please! Someone? Anyone?!” Desperate cries. If the guy was an actor, then he deserved an award.

Swallowing hard, I snuck closer. “H-hello...?”

Whoever it was squeaked loudly, the banging seeming to erupt from the small back alley all at once. It was so sudden that I backed up a few steps, fully prepared to turn tail and run at the first sign of a big black van rolling up. _So_ was not losing my kidneys tonight.

“Hi! Hello! Oh, oh thank goodness! I-I’m sorry to disturb you, but... But could you please help me? I’ve been here for d-days now and I...”  
  
 _“Days?!”_ I exclaimed in disbelief. The poor guy! My sheer need to help won out over whatever black market organ thievery nightmares might have been floating around in my head and I ventured farther back into the alleyway. I’d thought he was in the dumpster, originally, but the closer to that I got, the more clear it was that such was not the case. Given that fact, then where...

I froze, when I saw a cage that barely looked as though it would have fit a medium-sized dog, much less a full-grown man. Yet, somehow, he was all contorted in there, in the most spectacular manner imaginable. “H-how is that even possible?!” The words came out in a shout, before I could muster the tact to stop them.

“It _hurts!_ ”   
“O-okay! Just... just hold on!”


End file.
